The Two Sexes: Growing up Apart, Coming Together
Review by Carol Tavris
Contributed by Jodie Miller
The Two Sexes: Growing up Apart, Coming Together
BY ELEANOR E. MACCOBY
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1998 ($39.95)
'In childhood, boys and girls often establish two separate "cultures" that
reflect their different play preferences.......but in adulthood, most men
and women become "bilingual."'
Talking about sex differences is America's second favorite indoor sport.
(The first is practicing them.) Women wonder why little boys love guns,
dump trucks and robots, why men hog the remote and why their husbands
don't talk about their feelings. Men wonder why women talk so much about
feelings and don't just get on with it. Maybe, we privately think,
scientists really will one day discover a techno-gizmo gene on the Y
chromosome and a recessive verbo-blather gene on the X.
Everyone is fascinated by sex differences, and that's the problem for
researchers who study them. More than any other topic of inquiry, we live
this one--in our beds, boardrooms, playgrounds, kitchens--so we all have
our favorite theories that fit our experiences and prejudices. Scientists,
though, must confront what they call "the paradox of gender": the fact
that while they are rummaging around in their laboratories trying to find
sex differences and locate their origins, in the outside world sex
differences rise and fall (so to speak) as rapidly as hemlines and stock
prices.
A mere 40 years ago, for example, who could have predicted the blurring of
gender rules and roles we see now? What would Ozzie and Harriet have made
of basketball star Dennis Rodman, sashaying around in outfits appropriate
for several different genders; the growing political activism of
transsexuals, intersexuals and bisexuals; sex chat rooms on the Internet;
hard-muscled women running marathons; and soft-hearted men changing their
babies' diapers?
In The Two Sexes, Eleanor E. Maccoby, professor emerita of psychology at
Stanford University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, has
taken a terrific stab at the paradox of gender. The most important theme
of her book is that the behavior we attribute to gender is not a matter of
individual personality; it is an emergent property of relationships and
groups. What people say, what they do and how they speak with members of
their own sex differ considerably from how they behave when the other sex
is around. Maccoby threw a hand grenade into her field of developmental
psychology years ago when she showed that gender differences in children
couldn't be accounted for by personality traits but rather by the gender
composition of a group. Little girls aren't "passive" as some ingrained
quality, for example; they are passive only when boys are present.
This approach shows why traditional efforts to measure sex differences in
terms of individual traits or abilities (empathy, vanity, submissiveness,
intelligence, math abilities and so forth) are fruitless and become
quickly dated. Sex differences that show up in any study tend to be
artifacts of education, power, the immediate social context and the
historical moment, which is why they wax and wane with the times. For
example, "female intuition" about other people is actually subordinate's
intuition: both sexes are equally intuitive when they have to read a
superior's mood, nonverbal signals or intentions--and equally
thick-headed, when they are the bosses, about their subordinates'
feelings.
Maccoby sets out to explain the great mystery of gender development: the
virtually universal existence of gender segregation among children, which
remains impervious to the best efforts of egalitarian-minded parents and
teachers. Boys and girls will play together if adults require them to,
although it's often "side-by-side" play, in which each does his or her own
thing, but given their druthers, children self-segregate. The result,
Maccoby argues, is the emergence of a "girls' culture" and a "boys'
culture" that are strikingly different in play styles, toy preferences and
ways of interacting. Before long, as with any two nations, schools or
ethnic groups, boys and girls identify with their own in-group, they
stereotype and disparage members of the out-group, and they misunderstand
or feel uncomfortable with the other group's ways of doing things.
The most puzzling fact about the two cultures of gender, however, is their
asymmetry. Boys' groups, Maccoby shows, are "more cohesive than girls'
groups: more sexist, more exclusionary, more vigilant about
gender-boundary violations by their members, and more separate from adult
culture." Throughout childhood, as throughout life, there are fewer
penalties for girls who encroach on boys' turf and who like to do boy
things than for boys who venture onto girls' territory.
And so the great question is: Why? Why are children, in the words of
sociologist John H. Gagnon, the Gender Police, enforcing rigid stereotypes
that many of their parents have long discarded? Why do they behave
differently with their own sex than with the other? And what, if anything,
is the link between childhood and adulthood, considering how many members
of the Gender Police eventually become gender criminals, breaking as many
gender rules as they can, or gender revolutionaries, trying to rewrite the
rules altogether? Maccoby's answers are both timely and old-fashioned,
falling squarely between two antithetical trends in the current study of
gender.
Opposite or Other?
One, the oldest empirical tradition, takes an essentialist approach.
Essentialists regard a gender-related attitude, trait or behavior as being
something embedded in the person--internal, persistent, consistent across
situations and time--and thus they tend to regard the sexes as
"opposites": men are aggressive, women pacifistic; men are rational, women
emotional. The most extreme version of essentialism is represented by
pop-psychologist John Gray, who thinks men are from Mars and women are
from Venus. But here on Earth all kinds of other notions of inherent
sexual opposition are widespread. For Jungians and psychoanalysts, men and
women are guided by opposite archetypes and unconscious dynamics.
For some feminist psychologists, men and women have inherently different
ways of knowing, ways of speaking, ways of moral reasoning and the like.
For neuroscientists, men's and women's brains operate differently. For
sociobiologists, male promiscuity and female monogamy are opposite,
hard-wired reproductive strategies. (When sociobiologists learned that the
males of many species are nurturant and monogamous and the females of most
species are promiscuous, they reconnoitered and decided that these
reproductive strategies too are adaptive.)
In contrast, researchers who take a social constructionist approach
vigorously dispute all forms of essentialism. Social constructionists hold
that there is no "essence" of masculinity and femininity, for these
concepts and labels are endlessly changing, constructed from the eye of
the observer and from the historical and economic conditions of our lives.
"Opposition," for example, is a social construction, not an empirical
reality; it is a stereotype that blinds us to the greater evidence of
gender similarity. Are men rational? Sure, except in love, war and
sporting events. Are women unaggressive? Sure, unless you define
"aggressiveness" as the intention to harm another, in which case they
don't differ from men. Constructionists regard gender as a performance,
not an attribute. People don't have a gender, they do gender, which is why
their behavior changes so much depending on the situation. A teenage boy
may "do" masculine when he's with a pack of his male friends but "do"
feminine by tenderly caring for his baby brother (if his friends aren't
watching).
For the constructionists, therefore, the really interesting news about
gender lies not in the traditional oppositional categories but in the
increasingly diverse and growing numbers of people who aren't conforming
to the categories at all. Even to the fundamental categories of male and
female: biologists such as Anne Fausto-Sterling and others have shown that
human dimorphism is neither as obvious nor as universal as most people
believe. The number of "intersexed" infants born with anatomical, hormonal
or genotypic ambiguities is about 2 percent of all live births--a small
percentage, but many thousands of individuals. Recent books in this genre
include Suzanne J. Kessler's Lessons from the Intersexed, Marianne van den
Wijngaard's Reinventing the Sexes and Alice D. Dreger's Hermaphrodites and
the Medical Invention of Sex.
Maccoby, calling her book The Two Sexes, is not remotely interested in the
"transgender" research that is revolutionizing gender studies; she finds
the whole subject tangential to the question of male-female differences.
Yet she also rejects biological reductionism and other essentialist ideas
of opposition. She refers always to the "other" sex, never the "opposite"
sex; she never assumes that biology is the whole story, emphasizing
repeatedly that it interacts with experience and culture. For example,
childhood sex segregation may be universal, but it differs in form and
degree depending on culture. Societies in which men clearly have higher
status than women, Maccoby reports, are those in which boys make "the
earliest and strongest efforts to distance themselves from women and
girls--from their own mothers, as well as from other females."
In the second part of her book, Maccoby reviews the voluminous research on
biological factors, socialization practices and cognitive processes that
might explain the mystery of children's self-segregation. Many of the
findings here are fascinating. For instance, sex segregation does not
originate because boys have a greater "activity level," as commonly
believed. In fact, boys aren't more physically active than girls when
children are playing on their own. But when boys play with other boys,
they become more excited and aroused than girls do and by different
things: threats, challenges and competition. High rates of male activity
are a consequence of male-male play, not a cause. Besides, activity levels
decline from ages four to six, when gender segregation steadily increases.
Maccoby, a scrupulous scientist, gives us a state-of-the-art review of the
research, not a cohesive argument designed to support a thesis. In this
age of simplistic pop-psych overgeneralizations, her caution and scholarly
rigor are refreshing. Yet readers may occasionally get lost in the dense
thickets of evidence for and against each line of explanation. I felt I
was eating many delicious raisins while being denied the satisfaction of a
whole piece of cake.
The third section of the book, in which Maccoby examines the links between
childhood and adulthood, is the weakest, perhaps because of her own
ambivalence. On the one hand, she argues that the gender segregation
established in childhood and the asymmetrical cultural differences that
result from it persist in many adult contexts, including the workforce and
men's and women's habits, preferences and disputes. Many men don't listen
to their wives, Maccoby suggests, for the same reason that little boys
refuse to be influenced by little girls.
On the other hand, she subtitles her book "Growing up Apart, Coming
Together," which accurately reflects the fact that vast changes in men's
and women's relationships have occurred "in spite of, rather than because
of, the way boys and girls are socialized by their parents"--and in spite
of, I might add, sex differences in hormones or alleged brain function.
Among adults, circumstances and experiences supersede the maturational
pull of genes and hormones and even the socializing pull of parental
instruction. That is why a random group of 50-year-olds is more diverse
than a group of five-year-olds and why adults today find themselves doing
things they once would never have imagined for themselves. And it's why
Maccoby's generalizations about adults seem flat and stereotypic (although
certainly they have an element of truth), in contrast to her brilliant
portrayal of children.
The war between essentialists and constructionists is bound to continue,
and this book will provide ammunition for both sides. But perhaps the war
between men and women will find a lasting truce if, as Maccoby hopes, we
understand that men and women don't have to be the same in order to be
equal--in opportunities, income or love.
CAROL TAVRIS is a social psychologist who writes frequently on the
behavioral sciences. She is author of The Mismeasure of Woman and
co-author of two textbooks, Psychology and Psychology in Perspective.
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